Of Mice and Human-Eating Firebird Men
by Iwovepizza
Summary: "But hey, at least I didn't resort to eating humans." "Why didn't you?" "Mice are so much better-tasting." (Or that one where Kaz is a monster with serious pyromaniac problems and Inej wants to smash her face into a wall because she should kill him BUT HES KIND OF HOT OKAY) Creature AU One-shot


_"_ _Hope rises like a phoenix from the ashes of scattered dreams."_

 _-S.A. Sachs_

-Ӝ-

It is so incredibly strange and quite morbid that autumn is so beautiful, and yet everything is dying. Dried leaves crackled and twigs snapped under Inej's boots, and the chilly September air nipped at her nose and cheeks, flushing them red. It was late afternoon, the cold sun high in the sky as it watched the world it nurtured turn into a barren wasteland, the trees growing skeletal and the grass turning brown, but Inej wasn't deterred as she continued onward. Her knives were a comforting weight in her hands and on her hips, and though she wasn't going for stealth this time, she still stalked through the underbrush like a panther stalking its prey. She'd abandoned her food supplies in her hotel room in case having a particularly strong-smelling item with her would hinder her plight, but she would've done anything for a few sips of water or perhaps a protein bar.

She recalled everything she'd done leading up to this point, and found that she was almost sad that this whole expedition was winding down; it would mean that the excitement and anticipation of waiting for this exact day would be gone, and those feelings were what had fueled her during this past week or so. She remembered how this all started; Jesper showed it to her in the newspaper, which he held up with one hand while he used the other to twine his fingers through Wylan's.

"Look at this!" he'd announced excitedly slamming it down in front of Inej, who blinked at it blearily as she nursed her coffee mug. "Seventeen accounts of arson in this one specific area in one month. Eleven people dead altogether. There is absolutely no evidence to work with except for a long, golden feather or two left at the scenes, but there are no local birds that fit the plumage color, and investigators have concluded that they are, indeed fake. I highly doubt that, because the whole report had huge gaps in information, including but not limited to which scientists concluded that the feathers were phony. Now, is this a monster, or is it a monster?"

"Definitely a monster," Inej concluded, wide awake now as she sat a little straighter in her seat. Matthias and Nina had yet to wake up, and Inej had never in her wildest dreams thought that she'd discover a ground-breaking case like this during the times when the Slat was the most sluggish. This ragtag team, the Dregs, had been hunting monsters well before they'd ever assembled, and now that their powers were combined, they could all work together in order to take down the things that went bump in the night, and make the world a safer place. "What leads do you have?"

"Well," Wylan began, taking out his laptop and tapping at a few keys, bringing up the town's webpage. "The place is all the way out in no-man's-land Idaho, but traveling there shouldn't be an issue." He clicked a few more times, squinting a bit as his eyes skimmed the words. He was taking reading classes, courtesy of the rest of the Dregs, since he'd come from a poor family in Kansas that had neither the time to teach him nor the money to send him to school; he didn't like to talk about it, but his father had gotten rich off stocks and then had proceeded to leave Wylan and his mom for a younger woman. He'd been too busy working the fields to try and learn to read, but he was a virtuoso and incredible with math. "However, this particular town has a pretty extensive and…odd history."

"What of it?" Inej asked, her brows knitting together as she put her mug down on its respective coaster.

"Well, for one thing they've had to rebuild it many, many times, because, would you look at that, it _burned down_." Wylan turned the computer towards Inej, and she took it gingerly, knowing that she would be in ten kinds of trouble if she broke it. Her eyes widened as she skimmed the many articles from the town, Laurensberg's, newspaper, all of them depicting headlines that proclaimed that much of the village had fallen to flames. The newspapers ranged from 1897 to only about ten years ago. Wylan continued on as Inej read how investigators announced the fires to have started from stray cigars or electrical shortages, "The folks that live there call it a curse, and have actually invested in making their houses fireproof. There have been ten cases where the entire town has burnt to cinders, fifteen cases where the entire town has half-burned, and over fifty cases where small blazes have broken out, and that's only in the last hundred years. Needless to say, their fire department is paid handsomely."

"Wow," Inej murmured, whistling and handing the computer back to Wylan.

"What is it?" Nina asked sleepily, shuffling into the dining room in her robe and slippers, with a bleary-eyed Matthias not far behind. "Another case?"

"Yup," Jesper confirmed, stretching languidly. "We're dealing with a monster that has control of fire or something, because the little village it's terrorizing has burned down quite a bit in the last few centuries."

"So are we talking an efreet?" Matthias inquired, plopping down on the chair next to Inej with a grunt "Maybe a hellhound or a dragon?"

"It can't be an efreet. It's too elusive for that," Wylan stated, his eyes glued to the screen as he tapped away at the keys. "I'm pulling up one of the websites, and other hunters have been commenting about this case for years. With us being rookies, we probably haven't heard about it, but it's a running joke amongst hunters, and before they go to kill monsters they sometimes say 'I hope this isn't a Laurensberg'. It's because no hunter who's ventured to Laurensberg has ever been able to locate, much less kill, this mystery monster."

"Efreets and hellhounds are too obvious, too clumsy to manage to dodge the best hunters in the country. They're not smart enough to stay hidden," Matthias muttered, mostly to himself.

"Exactly," Wylan confirmed, a divot appearing in his brow, "Dragons have gone extinct except for the ones who've befriended hunters, and even if it was somehow a wayward dragon, there would be a lot more thefts as well. Dragons horde shiny things, remember?"

"Then that leaves cherufes and lampads," Nina announced as she returned from the kitchen, carrying her coffee and Matthias's tea. "So basically we're dealing with an evil humanoid creature made of rock and magma or an angry fire spirit."

"What about phoenixes?" Wylan asked innocently, and the rest of the Dregs broke out into an uproarious laughter. Sometimes Wylan's inexperience really did show.

"Phoenixes are a myth!" Jesper guffawed, clapping his hands together. "A children's tale!"

"But you guys told me on the first day that there's no such thing as myths or tales in our line of work!" Wylan protested, frowning, which only made everyone laugh harder. Tears were actually rolling down Nina's cheeks.

"That's what makes it funny!" she managed to gasp between bouts of uncontrollable laughter, nearly splashing herself with her coffee as her hands shook. "They're just like unicorns and elves and leprechauns. Complete and total bullshit."

"Then what explains feathers at the sites of the fires?" the redhead challenged, but his resolve seemed to be wavering, uncertainty plain in his icy blue eyes.

"Some cherufes and lampads have been seen who have feathers," Jesper supplied helpfully, wiping the corners of his eyes daintily, but he sounded unsure of himself. Wylan glared at him as if he hoped Jesper would explode if he narrowed his eyes enough, but the fight had drained from the rookie hunter's body, and he let out a sigh of resignation.

"Fine," he scoffed, having flushed bright red in his humiliation. "Then out of cherufes and lampads, which ones are more likely to be terrorizing a small town in Idaho?"

"Definitely lampads," Matthias told him firmly, and everyone assembled nodded in unanimous agreement. "Cherufes usually live near sites with volcanic activity, so they only really pose as threats to people visiting Yellowstone or something. Lampads, on the other hand, are beyond common. They're spirits of people who've died in fires and for some reason rebirthed into vengeful beings, all who try to exact punishment upon nearby people in the form of deadly blazes. The first fire in…" he looked to Jesper, who quickly glanced at the computer.

"1897."

"…1897 was probably a true accident, but it killed someone in the village and they came back to terrorize the people there by setting their homes on fire time after time."

"The only problem is that many, many other, more skilled hunters have probably assumed it was a lampad," Inej pointed out, frowning a bit and setting her coffee to the side as she steepled her hands under her chin. "Lampads are really difficult to banish; they have no bones to burn like with a normal vengeful spirit, so they've attached themselves to a certain site. With all of the hunters coming in and out, I bet every penny in my bank account that _every single_ spot where a building was or is, has been cleansed of spirits. That means they must've died in the swathes of forest around the town that have been burned. How are we going to find the spot where they died?"

Silence.

"I didn't think of that," Nina finally remarked, taking another nonchalant sip of her coffee. "Well, I know that I'm not taking this job. Matthias and I are pooped from that wendigo in Minnesota." Matthias groaned an affirmative, his hand moving to the huge Band-Aid on his cheek where the creature's claws had slashed him.

"Wylan and I already had to handle the vampire nest in Rhode Island," Jesper added hastily. All eyes turned to Inej, who groaned.

And that was why Inej was trudging through the forest, her eyes darting around to look for signs of a lampad death site being nearby; scorch marks on the trees or charred footprints in the dead leaves underfoot. She'd been walking for quite a while now, and had yet to see any signs of a lampad inhabiting the area. What she did see, though were bones.

The skulls of mice and deer grinned and leered at her, the paleness of them standing out against the leaves like spots of white paint in a bucket of ink. There were other animals too. Birds. A huge jawbone that looked like it belonged to a bear of some sort. Inej's heart began to hammer inside of her chest. Lampads didn't do these kinds of things; since they were spirits, they didn't have to eat. There was no other explanation to these occurrences, and Inej was starting to suspect that something much bigger was behind all of this. The realization made her blood turn to ice, and she noted how she was horribly unprepared to fight anything but a lampad; she had rock silver bullets loaded into her guns, iron weapons, and an entire bag full of salt in her backpack. All of these would prove useless against another being, and she began to write her obituary inside of her head.

That's when she caught movement at the corner of her eye. She whirled, her shotgun out and ready; even though silver bullets would do little to harm this being, they would sure hurt like a bitch and hopefully be able to slow it down enough for Inej to escape. Needless to say, she was shocked when she didn't come came face to face with a flaming spirit, but rather a boy about her age, who was crouched in the large, skeletal oak before her. She didn't dare lower her shotgun; there were many, many creatures that took human forms, and who knows? Maybe it was a lampad that was much more solid-looking because it was so powerful.

"Hello?" she called to him. He was quite handsome to say the least, with pale skin and dark eyes and hair, and he was wearing a button-down shirt and torn jeans, which was a clashy but quite hot combination. He held himself like an acrobat, perched on the branch lowest to the ground (it was still high enough that he could break a bone if he fell) with an ease that made even Inej impressed, and she came from a long line of performers. The branch beneath him should've been too thin to support his weight, and he certainly wouldn't've been able to balance on it had he not been professionally trained, so Inej was leaning more towards him being a lampad; spirits had no weight, after all.

"Why are you here?" he inquired. God, his voice. It was like he gargled gravel in his spare time, and yet it was sleek like a lawyer's when they made their claims.

"Um…" she hesitated, wondering if it was an okay idea to tell someone, who was a main suspect of being a monster, that she was hunting said monster. He waved her off with a pale hand, his dark eyes glittering with an intelligence that Inej had never seen in any human before. Definitely the monster, and definitely not a lampad.

"Don't answer that question. I know quite well that you are a hunter," he gave a pointed look at her shotgun, "and you are here to hunt the one who is constantly setting the town alight." Inej's lips pursed into a thin line, and her muscles tensed as she readied herself for an attack, though the boy still remained on his perch. "Please don't waste your time. Leave and come back with more suitable weaponry. I'm very old, human, and I believe I'm entitled to a fair fight."

"What the hell are you?" Inej demanded, her words soft but her tone firm as she hefted her shotgun higher. Her silver knives, which she brought everywhere no matter the monster, were a comforting weight at her hips. "And why do you keep burning away Laurensberg?" The boy's expression finally changed from one of indifference, instead contorting into a sneer. He blinked and suddenly his eyes were molten, blazing bright like the sun.

"I'm nothing like anything your putrid human race has ever encountered before," he snarled, and Inej's blood roared in her ears as her heart flew in her chest, but the boy blinked again and the light was gone, replaced once more by the color of bitter coffee. His expression had schooled itself like before. "As for the part about the town, I'm afraid I can't tell you that." Inej didn't waste a second- she fired. The bullet went wide, with Inej not being the best shot, and it whistled towards the space right next to the creature's shoulder. And then, by some miracle, it made contact. The humanoid let out a sound that was much akin to an eagle screeching, scaring Inej right out of her skin, and lost his balance, toppling to the ground.

Only, a boy didn't hit the ground.

Instead, Inej came face to face with a gigantic golden bird. It was gorgeous, its feathers like tongues of fire and its body as big as a Labrador, its wings spanning ten feet long from tip to tip. The left one had Inej's bullet stuck in it. The ground beneath it began to smolder a bit, and the bird squawked, its magma eyes wide and frantic as it flapped its right wing feebly.

"Phoenix," Inej whispered harshly, her eyes impossibly wide. Her brain took a few moments to reboot, but almost immediately after she brought out the fireproof blanket from her backpack, which she would've wrapped herself in had she encountered the nonexistent lampad. The phoenix screeched in what seemed to be anger as well as fear as she wrapped it in the blanket and hoisted it up into her arms. It thrashed and squirmed, and Inej eyed its long tail-feathers warily; they were free and perfectly capable of burning Inej's leg. Its head was covered, but thousands of scenarios ran through Inej's head, all of which involved the phoenix getting free and pecking the hunter's eyes out with its wickedly sharp beak.

"Okay. I can do this," she whispered to herself.

The phoenix let out another bellow.

-Ӝ-

Inej was getting severely freaked out. The phoenix said nothing now that he was in the custody of the hunters, despite the fact that Inej was pretty damn sure he was able to speak. He did glare a whole lot, though, and Inej tried not to wither under the weight of his intense glower as he perched at the edge of the bench in his (noticeably fireproof) cell. His wings were out now, making him look like some sort of angel of death, but one of them dragged on the floor whenever he got up to pace, his bandages specially made to withstand the smoldering intensity of his body. Luckily, Inej found that his human body couldn't burn things like his bird one could, and he seemed determined to remain in human form whenever his wardens were around.

"I'm going to ask you again," Inej demanded through the bars, sitting crisscross applesauce. "Why are you setting Laurensberg on fire over and over again?" The phoenix didn't respond, instead narrowing his eyes even further to the point where it was comical. "Seriously, dude, you need to tell me or else we'll have to execute you." The phoenix tilted his head, his eyes glinting with something akin to genuine concern. The fucker _did_ care about something: himself.

"He's not going to say anything," Matthias snarled, his lips peeling away in a sneer. "It's better if we just lob his head off and hang his wings on the wall." The phoenix jerked, his eyes growing wide and fearful as his feathers fluffed up. "I'm going out for dinner with Nina, and when I get back I'll handle it. You should probably get upstairs and rest a bit, Inej. A hunt like that deserves drinks, and we can all have wine in front of our new trophies." A shudder from the phoenix, which Matthias grinned at before lumbering off. Inej watched him go, her brows knitted, and when she turned her gaze back to the cell she nearly leapt out of her skin when she saw the phoenix pressed against the bars, his eyes wild.

"You seem kinder than him," the phoenix told her gruffly, white-knuckling the bars. In that moment he looked every bit like the monster he was, his eyes glowing faintly. "Inej? That's a nice name."

"Shut up, unless you want to give us answers," the hunter hissed, rising to her feet as her hands hovered over her knives, her muscles tensing and her eyes wary. The Dregs knew little about phoenixes other than the fact that they could be killed with consecrated bullets soaked in holy water, which they had plenty of. Matthias had been exaggerating when he'd said that he'd chop the monster's head off, but they never could be too careful; they'd thought phoenixes were myths, after all.

"Please, you have to listen to me," the phoenix growled, but his tone was a bit desperate. "I'm fine with you killing me. I've done some pretty bad things, so I'm A-OK for those bad things to come back and bite me in the ass, but you have to hear me out. Please."

"And why should I listen to a monster who's killed hundreds of people, who's _burned_ hundreds of people?" Inej inquired, cocking a brow. "And who says you're not lying or trying to swindle me? I'm not _that_ foolish, you brute."

"Yeah, I get it, I'm untrustworthy," the phoenix snapped. "And I have a name, you know, It's Kaz."

"I really could care less," Inej scoffed.

"But that means you care, at least a little," the phoenix, Kaz, pointed out, and his arrogance made Inej's blood boil. She was the one in charge here, not him, and he had absolutely no right to crack jokes as if he had any authority. "But please I need to ask you a favor, and if you can withhold it I'll face my death with dignity, and try not to burn the face off that blond-haired attack dog you have there."

"I'm listening," Inej grunted, crossing her arms and trying to seem indifferent, but a hint of curiosity sparked inside of her. This monster was ruthless, but he was also beautiful and exotic, something that she would like to learn more about. Too bad he was going to be dead by sundown.

"Please, I'm begging you…" Inej swore she heard his voice crack a little. "When you…kill me…please leave my corpse alone. It'll dissolve to ashes on its own eventually, but before then make sure…" he paused, closing his eyes and sitting back on his heels, sighing as his hands slipped from the bars. His wings drooped. In that moment he looked so small, so vulnerable. Inej noticed just how thin he was, how his cheekbones jut from his face and his arms were just thick enough not to be considered sticks. The first seed of doubt and sympathy was planted in her mind in that moment, and it felt unjust to kill him without hearing him out first. They'd encountered nice monsters before, after all.

Kaz looked up at her, his eyes round and sad. "When I die, bury my body in a field somewhere before it turns to ashes, and if you can't get it there in time, scatter my ashes to the wind. Don't desecrate it, don't harvest any part of it. Can you do that for me?" It dawned on Inej; he didn't want Matthias to take his wings. He didn't want his feathers to be plucked and worn as necklaces, or his feet to be made into good luck charms.

"Won't the harvested parts just turn to ash?" Inej asked, but Kaz shook his head mournfully.

"Technically phoenix bodies don't just disintegrate. They catch fire no matter where they are; you could toss my body into the sea and it'll still go aflame, but if there are parts taken from it, they won't be consumed by the fire that usually does the job," Kaz murmured, looking down at his hands. "And if it makes you feel any better, all of those deaths were an accident, even if the fires were intentional."

"What?" Inej inhaled sharply, disbelief tinging the edges of her tone. The words were too easy on his tongue to be lies, though. "What do you mean?"

"Inej, every year, Laurensberg grows larger. I can't leave the area because that's other phoenix's territory and I'll be killed if I even step foot off of it."

"There are other phoenixes?" Inej gasped, and Kaz gave her a look that clearly stated 'duh.'

"The more they expand, the more I'm driven to the edges of my territory. It's remote, so the other phoenixes like Pekka and Jan and Per Haskell don't have a problem. I do. I don't really mind less space, I can just fly, but the animals certainly do. Inej, I'm starving." Inej looked to Kaz again and saw his sunken eyes, his thin hands. Phoenixes were supposed to blaze so brightly in their bird forms that they could make someone go blind, and Kaz's feathers had been dull. "Every year as Laurensberg advances, less and less animals come by in order to avoid the humans." He let out a bitter laugh. "They're thinking of building a highway now, too. I ate my first bit of roadkill two days before you came, Inej. I was so hungry…"

"What about all those bones?" Inej demanded, trying to contradict him, but she was growing more and more doubtful. "It sure looked like you were doing fine."

"Those animals were just passing through. Hell, I didn't even hunt for the mice in the woods; I masqueraded as a pest exterminator and rounded up the mice from an apartment building. That was a month ago."

"Why can't you just do that, then? Pretend to be human and gather up all the mice and rats that inevitably come along with humans?"

"Instead of grass chutes and berries, human rodents eat garbage, Inej, _garbage_ ," Kaz snarled. "As if winters weren't already hard. I'm relatively young, for a phoenix, anyway, and I've only died and risen from my own ashes a handful of times. It's not a pleasant experience, by the way. I've done it more in the past three centuries than I have in my millenia of existence. I admit it, I overreacted. I wanted to drive them out so I could eat a good meal for once, but you humans are so, so persistent. No matter how many times I burned down their village, they rebuilt." Inej saw the way Kaz slumped, kept his eyes on the ground and rubbed his arm a little, and how his uninjured wing fluttered a bit as he talked. He looked so pitiful, like an angel with broken wings. "But hey, at least I didn't resort to eating humans."

"Why didn't you?"

"Mice are so much better-tasting." Inej was surprised that she found it offensive that Kaz would prefer to eat a mouse than a human because the former tasted better, but then she realized that Kaz would've had to actually have eaten a human to compare the two. She tried not to think about it, swallowing down bile as she scrutinized the phoenix with an intensity that she only reserved for when she was trying to weed out liars.

"Let's say I believe you," Inej stated suddenly, and Kaz looked up sharply, looking just as surprised as Inej felt for letting the words tumble from her lips. What was she saying? How was she going to win the favor of the Dregs? Maybe she could use her power as leader to sway them, but they could easily go against her and finish the job themselves. But she looked at Kaz, at how he'd perked up, how his eyes shined with hope, and it made her heart palpitate a little. "What are you going to do if I let you free?"

"I'm out of other phoenixes' territories now that you've brought me here too…?"

"Arkansas."

"That's great. If you let me go, I guess I'll just find a new territory. Out in the wilderness in Canada perhaps, where there's plenty of game. I could always migrate to the Everglades in the winter to pick off some of those awful invasive species." Inej stared at him for a few moments.

"I'll see what I can do."

-Ӝ-

 **SEVERAL YEARS LATER**

Inej woke to an incredibly warm body next to her, and she blinked blearily as she slowly shuffled into the waking world. The first thing she noticed was that Kaz was nosing at her neck, and the second thing she noticed was that his wings were out, cocooning her. He hadn't taken his wings out since that fateful day she'd met him, claiming that he was unsure of whether they would burn her or not. Now they were out, sunsets of color lightly skimming over her arms and leaving goosebumps in their wake. They weren't scalding in heat, per se, but it was like she was using heating pads instead of comforters and the temperature was just low enough to be considered not too hot.

As she shook off the last few wisps of sleep, she grinned and ran her hand down his thigh and he made a soft chirping sound that she, personally, thought was super adorable. Their legs were tangled together under the covers, with Kaz a tower of flame against Inej's back, and the human let her eyes slide closed as the phoenix's nosing became soft kisses. It had been a long month of bickering within the Dregs on what to do with Kaz. Matthias and Jesper wanted him dead while Wylan and Nina backed Inej up.

In truth, the true hero here had to be the werewolf that had somehow managed to get into the Slat one night, because she, unknowingly, was the one to whom Kaz owed his life. Had she not been so powerful and had she not brought all of her pack with her to storm the Dregs' headquarters, then Inej wouldn't've had an excuse to unleash Kaz from his cell. It had been an aweing experience to watch the phoenix spread his wings as the werewolves cowered, and once he'd leapt he'd been a blur of motion. All that had been left of the pack were a few charred body parts and loads of ashes that had been a bitch to clean up. After that, Matthias and Jesper had, grudgingly, granted him freedom.

But as he'd stood at the edge of the field, his wings spread and his eyes trained on the stars, Inej had put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, "Stay." Kaz could've had an incredible, adventure-filled life as a lone phoenix migrating from Canada to the Everglades, but instead he'd stayed with the Dregs. With Inej. Relationships between monsters and humans was not unheard of, but as Kaz's fingers skimmed over her sides and the press of the wedding band on his finger made her skin prickle, she couldn't help but think that they were special.

"We should have kids," Kaz said suddenly.

A pause.

"Mm'kay, but I need like five more minutes."

-Ӝ-

 **(A/N) I FUCKING LOVE WRITING ABOUT THESE DORKS. Inej/Kaz is my favorite ship ever and I'm sad that there aren't more fanfics of them. Sorry I made Matthias an asshole I really didn't have a choice when you think about it.**


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